Memory Marker:
Remembrance of Things Past
By Adrian Welsh
Any marker to ‘9/11’ must sit in relation to polar opposites:
the capitalist drive to extract dollars per sq ft on the site and
a desire to leave space for memory of this atrocity. But are
these truly irreconcilable opposites or could a creative
architect – or team (an important distinction) – reconcile
these goals partly or even fully?
I won’t dwell here on questions of how the
site is being parcelled up – it is
disappointing that separate competitions
were organised for ‘building’ and ‘memorial’
– but the separation is relevant as
background information. The ‘building’
competition came first probably due to its
scale and fiscal importance, the ‘memorial’
being slotted in afterwards with eight
typically minimalist ‘spaces’ mostly using
water and light, shortlisted. If a more
creative mind took charge of the rebuilding,
could the two have been married together?
Pre-Modernist memorials were mostly formal objects – such
as Lutyens’ Thiepval Arch in the Somme, dedicated to the
First World War dead. Modernism brought us simpler
structures – the Vietnam Memorial Wall in Washington DC
stands out, more recently Libeskind’s Memorial Garden
outside his Berlin Museum.
Memorials are described as being places to reminisce, but
normally, not too vividly: no overt references to falling bodies
will appear in the Twin Towers Memorial.To avoid offence
they seem to retract from death and tragedy into the pathos
of abstraction or general formality. Memorials inhabit a
‘twilight zone’ between architecture and sculpture; linked as
they often are to taboo subjects – here ‘atrocity’ – they
sometimes suffer from a lack of reasoned
critique.
But back to the opening question: can
Libeskind et al. make the dollar generator
into the memorial? Can ‘Freedom Tower’
itself have the required potency? The foot of
Manhattan is already a powerful marker for
many US immigrants – including members of
my own family. Arriving on a ship, one sees
the very empirical lights of Mammon shining
alongside the symbolic Statue of Liberty. The
latter has a dual purpose – icon and
climbable tourist attraction: how could the
‘Freedom Tower’ adequately express this
duality?
The tower height was originally fixed at 1,776 ft – to
resonate with America’s Year of Independence – but it fell flat

16

the drouth

for me.
Nevertheless, I expected it to change post-competition and
so it did. It is, however, unusual for the spec to be revised
upwards! The impression is of lip service to the tragedy
whilst the fiscal side works in the background: the result
being to simply parcel off a patch of prime
real estate purely for memory. The Ground
Zero site is owned by Larry Silverstein who,
together with George Pataki, the City
Governor, ran an international architecture
competition to find an architect/scheme for
the site. The shortlist was whittled down
eventually to Daniel Libeskind – radical
Polish-born architect – and Rafael Vinõly – a
conservative but contemporary architect
born in Mexico.
But cries of ‘sell-out to Silverstein’ –
especially from relatives – drown out the
logic of this situation: as with the Swiss Re
building in London [rebuilt after years of
IRA bombs], would not the burgeoning tower of real estate
be in fact the most fitting memorial? It should express City
values, embody confidence, and emanate determination to
progress. The people who died were primarily part of the
bullish capitalist drive to make money: why pretend
otherwise? Why wrap obscure reality with cotton-woolly,
disconnected abstraction?
Central to the memorial is symbolism and inscription. From
Stonehenge to the humble gravestone we see this. Take for
example Louis Kahn’s 1968 abstract memorial to the ‘Six
Million Jewish Martyrs’ proposed for Lower Manhattan: it
contained both – the central pier served as an ohel (chapel),
complete with inscription. The written word introduces the
personal – the name you can point to,
relate to. An unspoken rule of architecture
is that ‘good buildings don’t need signs’ (or,
by extension, ‘words’). Yet no architectural
memorial seems complete without
inscription. ‘Set in stone’ is a phrase to
suggest permanency – rootedness is a
comfort when suffering loss. Hope. Life
after death.
Memorials also of course allow the State,
organisations and people to make a joint
statement, exert power, show collective
respect. Just as arguments exist around
the extent of ‘respectful’ space around city
cathedrals – for example the years of
vigorous debate around Paternoster Square’s relationship to
St Paul’s Cathedral – so the same applies for memorials: do
monuments really need space? Discussion regarding this site

seems to have revolved around the notion of
amount of space given over to ‘memorial’: space
= respect.
This corollary comes from the public/private
opposition that has characterised debate on
urbanism for decades: the more ‘public realm’,
the greater the developer’s generosity and
perceived benevolence towards the populace.
The demand for rent creates maximum
development by default. The Public appears to
want ‘sacrifice’ where possible. Here the
sacrifice could be a viewing platform at the top of ‘Freedom
Tower’ a contemplative pool or a square for parades and
gathering. The clever bit (in developers’ eyes) is to dress the
necessary space around the building (building laws related to
light, etc.) up as this ‘sacrificial space’.
Monuments in the past were largely grand and impersonal,
arching over singularity to create plurality and collectivist
aspirations but mostly subjugation. The Arc de Triomphe,
Nelson’s Monument, the Monument to the Great Fire of
London all rise above an urban context to dominate the
humane.
But what validates ‘monument, differentiates it from sculpture
or building? Does the ‘title’ matter if you realise there exist
‘living structures’ (The London Eye) and ‘functionless
buildings’ (Calton Hill’s National Monument)? The Ground
Zero site will be home to one of the most observed
memorials ever, trying to come to terms with huge,
spectacularly vicious loss of life, and in one of the world’s
largest and most popular cities. New York often seems to
epitomise what we think a city should be. The memorial will
be a marker for more than atrocity: it will also become a
marker for cities, architecture and society in the future.
The agenda of the people, the owner/developer, city and
state may all vary. Monuments generally use scale, heroic
forms, emblems/icons, metaphor and allusion. This Marker
could synthesise function and memory and be emblematic of
New York. Empirical institutions and situations of the city
stand as allegories of the invisible substance of society as a
whole.

In these days of super-fast
media dissemination, the
permanence of solid
physical memorial may be a
welcome antidote, but the
possibilities for memorial
would have multiplied if
New York wanted a more
imaginative expression of
the current zeitgeist.
Imagine loops of crash
footage on a massive
screen, raining mannequins projected from above, the smell
of kerosene and worse, screams and sirens blasted around
the site complete with multi-screen slivers of reaction from
bereaved families. However, this is not a horror film-set but
a place of reconciliation for the bereaved, for East and West,
conservative and radical.
Libeskind is working on a book fittingly about ‘tragedy,
memory and hope, and the way architecture can reshape
human experience’: his asymmetric tower ostensibly follows
the Statue of Liberty so unless the forces of commerce
puncture this concept, we will have iconoclastic towers
forming a lop-sided symbolic gateway. Neither forms a
traditional abstract solid, the obelisks, pyramids and towers
of the past. The Twin Towers form modern day icons blasted
into people’s minds. The Towers were considered by many
to be ugly, but they will be a hard act to follow. Memory is
what matters most, not built form.

* In 1946 New York State Legislature set up a WTC Corporation to analyse
such a facility. The World Trade Centre idea formed in 1960* and preliminary
drawings were drawn up by SOM, who slipped in behind Libeskind 43 years
later (via David Childs). Michigan-based Minori Yamasaki and Emery Roth &
Sons completed the Twin Towers between 1966 and 1973. Yamasaki had over
100 schemes, one being a single 150-storey tower. Towers 1 and 2, nicknamed
‘David and Nelson’ after the supportive Rockefeller Brothers, became
quintessential New York symbols, appearing on a large proportion of
postcards.

Politically the site has to represent unbroken spirit,
confidence to progress, unhindered by fears of terrorism of
the populace, but without creating what Gideion termed
‘devaluation of symbols’, empty gestures of civic
monumentalism. Monuments should be catalytic. Tension
between the ‘opposites’ could be played up or down.
Aspirations of State could transmit to surging height or
connotations of peace and freedom.
In Rossi’s The Architecture of the City he defines monuments as
‘primary elements in the city which are persistent and
characteristic urban artefacts. They are distinguished from
housing, the other primary element in the city, by their
nature as a place of symbolic function, and thus a function
related to time, as opposed to a place of conventional
function, which is only related to use’. A monument is
dialectically related to the city’s growth.